Q&A with Katherine Locke

Get to know Festival speaker Katherine Locke, author of The Girl with the Red Balloon…

If you could make everyone in the world read one book, which would it be?

Sula by Toni Morrison

What is your favorite aspect of participating in book festivals?

I love being in the book community and especially in spaces where everyone is unabashedly a fan of reading. Festivals feel like a place where we hang up our specific genre hats and any baggage that comes with those hats, and we are all just readers celebrating books. I love that feeling.

Which other speakers are you excited to see or hoping to meet at the Festival?

Which part of your book are you most proud of?

I’m really proud of the way I wove together three stories and three points of view: Ellie, the girl from our time who was pulled through time to 1988 East Berlin; Benno, her grandfather and his experiences in a ghetto and then death camp in 1941-1942; and Kai, a Romani teenager hiding in East Berlin to protect his sister. I really like how they tied together!

What are you working on next?

I’m finishing up edits on The Spy with the Red Balloon, a companion book to The Girl with the Red Balloon, which comes out October 2, 2018. And I’m doing research in Budapest in early February for my next YA!